Many stadiums today have bench seats (bleachers) instead of individual seats. Bleachers have traditionally been made of long wooden planks with no backrest. Many modern and refurbished stadiums use bleachers made of metal, still with no backrest.
Sitting on bleachers for long periods of time can be uncomfortable in two ways. First, the bleacher is hard and can be uncomfortable to sit on for long periods of time. Secondly, sitting on a seat with no backrest can strain the upper and lower back.
To help solve this problem, cushions can be placed on the hard wooden or metal surface. These cushions address the pain of sitting on a hard surface, but they do not address strain on the upper and lower back.
Prior art solutions to back pain in bleacher seating provided the user with a padded seat combined with a backrest. The most widely used design is a foldable seat that has a seat portion and a backrest that are foldably connected. Hook(s) on the seat portion engage the front underneath portion of the bleacher to allow the user to lean back in the seat and not tip backwards. The seat portion can have a single hook in the center of the seat portion, or there can be two hooks, as set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 2,509,420 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,066,980, with one hook on each side of the seat portion.
There are drawbacks to these designs, however. First, the hook openings must match the thickness of the bleacher. If the hook opening is too small, it will not engage the bleacher. If the hook opening is too large, then the user will tilt backwards until the hook engages the bottom of the bleacher, which is undesirable. Therefore, prior art designs can be used only with stadiums with bleacher thicknesses that match the size of their hook opening. The user cannot use a single seat in two different stadiums that have two different bleacher thicknesses. Or, if a stadium retrofits its bleachers with thicker bleacher widths, then the seat becomes obsolete.
There is a need for a stadium seat that can effectively be used with varying thicknesses of bleachers.
Another drawback to the prior art devices is that they do not adequately secure the backrest to the seat portion for easy carrying when the stadium seat is in its folded/closed position. Some designs use the hook under the seat to engage a loop on the backrest, or to engage the backrest itself. But those designs fail to securely hold the backrest to the seat portion securely in a manner whereby the hooks cannot inadvertently become undone.
There is a need to provide an easy and effective way to secure the backrest to the seat portion for easy carrying when the seat is in its folded position.